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Monday, January 30, 2017

I
am pleased to report that our numbers have swelled recently – so much so that I
may need to request a bigger room!

For
February, we chose Cold Storage, Alaska by John Straley and Necessary Lies by
Diane Chamberlain, both of which are now on the Nooks.

Cold Storage, Alaska
by John Straley

Cold Storage, Alaska, is a remote fishing
outpost where salmonberries sparkle in the morning frost and where you just
might catch a King Salmon if you’re zen enough to wait for it. Settled in 1935
by Norse fishermen who liked to skinny dip in its natural hot springs, the town
enjoyed prosperity at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold
storage plant is all but abandoned and the town is withering.

Clive “The Milkman” McCahon returns to his tiny
Alaska hometown after a seven-year jail stint for dealing coke. He has a lot to
make up to his younger brother, Miles, who has dutifully been taking care of
their ailing mother. But Clive doesn’t realize the trouble he’s bringing home.
His vengeful old business partner is hot on his heels, a stick-in-the-mud State
Trooper is dying to bust Clive for narcotics, and, to complicate everything,
Clive might be going insane—lately, he’s been hearing animals talking to him.

Necessary Lies by
Diane Chamberlain

After losing her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy
Hart is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and nephew as tenants on
a small tobacco farm. As she struggles
with her grandmother’s aging, her sister’s mental illness and her own epilepsy,
she realizes they might need more than she can give.

When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace
County’s newest social worker, she doesn’t realize just how much her help is
needed. She quickly becomes emotionally
invested in her clients' lives, causing tension with her boss and her new
husband. But as Jane is drawn in by the
Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm—secrets much
darker than she would have guessed.
Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or
risk losing the battle against everything she believes is wrong.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Goodreads
is a wonderful resource for anyone who loves books and reading. It is an
excellent way of researching titles or authors and lets you keep track of what
you have read and what books make up your ‘To Be Read’ pile. This year it has
added a nice feature that provides a summary of activity for the last year, so
I thought that I would take that information and add some of my own to put the past
year into perspective.

How
much did we read?

In
2016, the group met 9 times and read 19 titles. Whist our shortest read was Coraline
at a mere 162 pages, Warbreaker filled a whopping 688, so we totaled 7,247
pages, with an average of 381. Most of the time I try to suggest books that are
shorter than 400 pages because I know that we cannot all find enough time to
read giant tomes: Warbreaker was one of our reads over the summer break.

Who
did we read?

Although
we are a ‘ladies only’ book group, we actually read 8 titles by male authors
this year (even without counting Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett as 2 separate
authors for Good Omens). I was pleased to see that we gave the gentlemen a
chance to prove that they can write as well as the ladies! Of our authors, only
one was responsible for 2 books, but as we have loved all our selections by Neil
Gaiman in the past I cannot be blamed for suggesting his work on a regular
basis. Terry Pratchett and Jan DeLima were authors that we had read in previous
years, but the others were all new to the group. One of the main reasons that I
joined the group originally was to discover new authors so I try to continue
that tradition, and our favorites have been woefully slow in producing new
works.

How
old were they?

The
oldest book we read this year was The Left Hand of Darkness published in 1965.
The newest titles were Autumn Moon and The Nightingale, which were both
published in 2015. The others showed a definite skew towards newer reads, with
14 titles published after 2000. I am not sure if this is a good or bad thing
and I keep looking at some of the classics and thinking that perhaps we should
try them. This worked well with To Kill a Mocking Bird in 2015 and again this
year with The Handmaid’s Tale, so I may keep it in mind for 2017.

What
genre were they?

I
try to keep us reading a wide range of genres and this year we read books that
fell into 15 categories other than ‘Fiction’. Somehow we chose to read a lot of
Fantasy (11 titles) even though I do offer alternatives. As a long-time Fantasy
/ Sci-Fi reader, I make an effort to suggest books from other genres because
not only do I want to try many different authors, but also I would prefer that
we do not get stuck in a rut. However, if the group keeps picking Fantasy I can
hardly complain! We also made our first forays into Non-Fiction, which was massively
successful and encourages me to look for other suitable titles to suggest.

Did
we like them?

Yes!

We
had a couple of titles that left us a little ambivalent, but we enjoyed the
majority and were blown away by quite a few. In fact there were only 2 titles
that the whole group disliked: River of Stars and The Left Hand of Darkness.
Both of these looked interesting and the Ursula K. Le Guin is recognized as a
classic of its genre, winning both the Hugo and Nebula Prizes, but, unfortunately,
they failed to engage our interest and left us more frustrated and confused
than enthralled and delighted. However, they did provoke some lively discussion
as we tried to work out what the authors were trying to do and why they did not
work for us.